Thursday, September 24, 2009

Life Links 9/24/09

A Catholic magazine in Poland which spoke out against a woman who wanted an abortion has been ordered by a Polish court to pay the woman $11,000 for speaking against her actions.

Tysiac has become a symbol for the abortion rights movement because she challenged Poland's ban on abortion with the European Court of Human Rights. In 2007, that court ordered Poland to pay her damages of euro25,000 (nearly $37,000) because doctors refused to let her terminate her pregnancy despite serious risk to her eyesight.

After giving birth, her eyesight deteriorated considerably due to a retinal hemorrhage and doctors declared her significantly disabled.

Following the ruling, the editor of Gosc Niedzielny (Sunday Visitor), Rev. Marek Gancarczyk, wrote: "We live in a world where a mother receives an award for very much wanting to kill her child, but not being allowed to do so."

In other words, if a despairing mother had help with suicide because her 18-year-old was run over by a bus, the policy states that punishing the crime would be in the public interest. But if the mother–or the young man’s best friend for that matter–assists his suicide because he has quadriplegia caused by the bus accident–it may not be in the public interest to prosecute that assisted suicide. Thus, this official document creates an explicitly invidiously discriminatory public policy that holds the lives of people who are healthy and able bodied as having greater value–and hence, are more worthy of protecting–than the lives of people with serious disabilities or the dying. That’s an astonishing abandonment of the most weak and vulnerable in society.

During the continuous, extensive coverage of this proposed legislation, there has been only very limited mention – and none I've seen in the mainstream press – of a section that penalizes doctors for Medicare patientswho, for at least five years (from 2015 to 2020), authorize total treatments that wind up in the top 10 percent of national annual Medicare costs per patient.

The 1 in 10 Medicare doctors who spend beyond this limit will themselves lose 5 percent of their own total Medicare reimbursements. Considering the already low rates Medicare doctors get – and the president pledges they will get lower – this could be a heavy penalty.

The black leaders are expected to use careful language -- echoing Obama's abortion funding pledge while cautioning the White House against breaking its promise.

"In accord with our commitment to Christian teaching, we wholeheartedly affirm the president's position that medical costs related to the abortion of fetuses shall not be covered by healthcare plans funded by this initiative," Blake will say today, according to an advance copy of his remarks.